Human visual perception is a funny thing. You can be absolutely certain that you see a particular thing, and unless  you look a little further you may never know how wrong you were.

On a recent walk with Zeke, I saw this.

Look into the woods

Does that dark object slightly above mid-picture look like anything to you? For a few seconds I was convinced it was a dog sitting on its haunches. I couldn’t tell what kind it was, but I thought either a German shepherd or a doberman. Once my mind had made that identification, that’s what it looked like. I began to fill in details and the longer I looked, the more it looked like a dog.

Then I asked myself why a dog would be sitting out in the woods like that, calmly watching us approach, without a motion. So I went closer.

A log is not a dog

Up close it doesn’t look much like a dog.

Why would I have identified this as a dog? From a distance this object had the rough outline of a sitting dog. Even the coloring suggested a dog, although part of what I saw as coloring was actually the leaves behind it, seen through the gap between its “legs” and its “body.” It was considerably larger than a dog, but at that distance, the scale was not immediately obvious. Also, abandoned dogs are far from rare on our rural mountaintop. And, probably most important, my wife and I have been discussing the possibility of getting another doberman. So, wishful thinking?

Would you have seen a dog, or something else?